If you’ve been on social media in the past few weeks, you’ve almost certainly heard the term “quiet quitting.” The phrase blew up on TikTok in July and August, and by now it’s the dominant frame for every workplace conversation about work-life balance, engagement, and what you owe your employer. The backlash has been swift and predictable. Critics say quiet quitting is just called “doing your job.” Defenders say it’s a necessary rejection of hustle culture and the myth that your career should consume your life. Both sides have a point, but they’re both missing the real problem.

Quiet quitting isn’t laziness, and it isn’t noble self-protection either. It’s a communication failure, and it’s one you can actually fix.

The Gallup data painting the backdrop here is worth sitting with for a moment. Only 32 percent of American workers report being engaged at work, which means two out of every three people you work with are either checked out or actively disengaged. That number hasn’t changed much in decades, which suggests the problem isn’t new; what’s new is that Gen Z workers on TikTok finally gave it a name. And now, in the shadow of tech layoffs and economic uncertainty, workers across industries are quietly reducing their effort, not out of spite, but out of self-protection. If the company doesn’t value loyalty, the thinking goes, why should I offer mine?

Here’s where it gets complicated for people working in IT specifically. Your job isn’t like most jobs. On-call rotations, incident response, the constant “we need this fixed NOW” culture; these things make it genuinely hard to clock out mentally or set boundaries without feeling like you’re failing the team. An application going down at 2 a.m. doesn’t care about work-life balance. That customer has a problem, your team needs you, and the work has to be done. The question is who bears the cost of that reality, and whether the conversation about that cost ever actually happens.

That’s the real issue. Quiet quitting often isn’t about refusing to work hard. It’s about workers who feel their boundaries aren’t respected and who, instead of advocating for those boundaries, simply withdraw from advocacy altogether. They stop pushing back. They stop speaking up in meetings. They stop trying to explain why their on-call rotation is unsustainable. They just quietly do the minimum and move their energy and emotional investment elsewhere. Over time, the team notices, engagement drops further, and the cycle reinforces itself.

The solution isn’t to decide whether quiet quitting is moral or immoral. The solution is to have the hard conversation with your manager about expectations, about what sustainable work actually looks like, and about what happens when the work isn’t sustainable.

Before the Conversation: Prepare

The instinct when you’re frustrated with boundaries is to catch your manager in the hallway and vent. Don’t do this. A conversation about expectations needs to be intentional, scheduled, and grounded in specifics rather than feelings.

Start by documenting what sustainable looks like for you. This isn’t about proving you’re already working hard; it’s about being clear with yourself first about where your actual limits are. Write down the patterns you’re seeing: how often you’re responding to messages after hours, how many pages you’re getting at night, how many weeks you’ve gone without a full day off, whether you’re actually sleeping, and whether you’re thinking about work when you’re supposed to be doing something else. If you’re in a remote role, the lines between work and home are already blurry, and the data helps you see where you’re spending mental energy even when you’re not technically working.

Next, think about what triggered this conversation in the first place. Are you burned out because the workload itself is genuinely too much for any single person to handle, or is it the structure of how the work is distributed? Is the on-call rotation fair, or are certain people consistently carrying more than their share? Is there a specific incident or a pattern of incidents that made you realize your boundaries aren’t being respected? Be honest about what you’re observing, separate from how frustrated you feel about it. A manager can dismiss feelings. They have a harder time dismissing data, especially when that data points to a genuine structural problem with how work is organized.

The third piece is understanding the business context. Tech layoffs are happening. Your company might be tightening budgets. Your team might be understaffed because hiring is frozen. Your manager might be under pressure from their own leadership to do more with less. None of this means your boundaries don’t matter; it means you need to go into the conversation understanding the constraints they’re working within. A manager who is genuinely trying to manage an impossible workload with insufficient resources is in a different position than one who simply doesn’t value you, even if the impact on your life is the same.

Finally, think about what you’re asking for. Don’t go into this conversation asking to work less; go in asking for clarity about expectations and for help making the workload sustainable. Are you asking for the on-call rotation to be restructured so that no single person is carrying it? Are you asking for the team to hire another engineer? Are you asking for incident response to be a team problem rather than your problem? Are you asking for a clear policy about when work communication stops, or for a commitment to not escalate non-urgent issues after hours? Know what you actually want before you sit down.

During the Conversation: Be Specific and Solution-Focused

Schedule a dedicated time, not a casual chat. Ask your manager to set aside 30 minutes for a conversation about workload and expectations. Many managers will immediately sense this is about compensation or promotion, so be straightforward in the meeting request: you want to talk about making sure the work is sustainable and you’re setting yourself up for long-term success.

Open with the data, not the complaint. Instead of “I’m burned out and I don’t think this is fair,” try something like, “I’ve been tracking my on-call pattern for the last six weeks, and I’m finding that I’m responding to pages an average of four times per night. Over the last month, I’ve had three days completely off. I know the work needs to be done, and I want to be reliable, but I’m concerned that this isn’t sustainable long-term for me or for the quality I can bring to the job.”

Notice what this does. It moves the conversation away from whether you’re complaining or weak, and toward a factual problem that needs solving. Managers can work with data. They can negotiate about whether the problem is as bad as you’re describing. But they can’t really argue that your personal sustainability doesn’t matter, especially if you frame it as a business problem: burned-out engineers make mistakes, they leave jobs, they stop caring about quality. A manager doesn’t need to feel bad for you to want to retain you.

From there, be solution-oriented. If the on-call rotation is brutal, propose a restructuring. If the team is understaffed, propose either hiring or reprioritizing work. If the issue is that urgent work keeps interrupting planned work, propose a triage process or a dedicated team for incident response. If the issue is that you’re mentally on-call even when you’re technically off, propose a policy about communication channels or response times. The specific solution matters less than showing that you’ve thought about how to address the underlying problem, not just how to make yourself feel better.

Importantly, acknowledge the constraints your manager is working within. “I know we’re under budget pressure right now” or “I understand we can’t hire immediately” shows that you’re not asking for the impossible. It also means that when you propose solutions, they’re more likely to be realistic and collaborative. You’re not attacking your manager; you’re problem-solving together. That’s the frame that keeps the conversation from becoming defensive or adversarial.

This is also where managing up matters. If you have a relationship where you’re helping your manager succeed, and you’re demonstrating that you’re serious about sustainable work rather than just venting, they’re more likely to take you seriously. If you’ve never talked about this before and suddenly you’re bringing data and concerns, it lands differently than if you’ve been signaling all along that this is important to you. That framing and relationship building is a skill worth developing, and it applies directly to this conversation.

What to Document

Here’s what often gets missed: you might have a good conversation and your manager might be receptive and genuinely want to help. But without accountability, nothing changes. Create a summary of what you discussed and what was agreed to, and send it to your manager for confirmation.

This doesn’t need to be formal or accusatory. Something like, “Thanks for taking the time to talk today. My understanding is that we’re going to restructure the on-call rotation so that each person covers one week per month instead of rotating daily, and we’ll revisit whether that’s working in a month. I’ll also have the hiring manager loop in on the engineering shortage so we can see what we can do there. Does that capture what we discussed?” Get a confirmation, even if it’s just an emoji reaction.

This accomplishes two things. First, it ensures that you and your manager are actually aligned about what was agreed to. Second, it creates a record. If nothing changes, you have documentation that the conversation happened, what was discussed, and what was supposed to be different. That’s valuable not just for your own sense of whether you should look for another job, but also because it’s evidence if you need to escalate to HR or take more serious steps.

What If the Conversation Goes Badly

Sometimes managers aren’t receptive. Sometimes they dismiss your concerns, or they tell you that this is just what the job requires, or they suggest that if you’re not willing to commit to the workload, maybe you should find somewhere else to work. That’s a conversation that shifts significantly.

If your manager isn’t willing to have a serious conversation about sustainability, you have some difficult choices. You can escalate to their manager or to HR, but that decision carries real risk in most organizations, and you should think carefully about whether you trust your company’s HR team to take your concerns seriously rather than managing them. You can try again in a few weeks with a different framing. You can start looking for another job, either internally or externally. You can decide that you’re going to accept that this is the job and make peace with the hours, knowing that it’s temporary. Or you can go quiet.

Here’s the thing about quiet quitting: it’s not actually wrong to do it. It’s not a moral failing. It’s a rational response to a manager or company that has made it clear they don’t care about your sustainability or your boundaries. But it’s also not a solution, because what often happens is that you quietly check out, your performance suffers, and then you’re the one who gets managed out or laid off first. The company loses a good engineer, and you lose a reference and some of your professional reputation. In the meantime, you’re spending forty hours a week in a job where you’ve decided not to engage. That’s a miserable way to spend your time.

If a manager won’t have the conversation, you’re better off looking for one who will. That’s not quitting; that’s respecting your own time enough to find somewhere that does too.

The Real Issue

Back to where we started. Quiet quitting went viral because workers are tired of being asked to sacrifice their lives for their jobs, and because after two years of crisis-mode work during the pandemic, the implicit deal has broken. Companies laid off loyal employees. Remote work made it harder to disconnect. The boundaries that used to exist naturally disappeared. Workers looked around and realized they were giving more than they were getting back.

That’s not laziness. That’s burnout expressing itself as withdrawal rather than as a dramatic resignation or a breakdown. And yes, it’s a communication problem, but it’s not the worker’s job to fix it unilaterally. The manager has to be willing to have the conversation too.

If your manager is willing to talk, you have a chance to reset expectations and actually make the work sustainable. If they’re not, you know something important about your future there. Either way, the conversation itself is worth having, because it clarifies whether you and your company actually want the same things. And in a job market where companies are scrambling to retain engineering talent, most of them do. You just have to be willing to ask.

The quiet quitting discourse treats boundaries as an individual problem. In truth, they’re a team problem. And like any team problem, they need to be addressed together. That starts with one conversation, and the courage to have it clearly.